Art Mid-term review

One of the oldest sculptures ever discovered is an extraordinary ivory statuette, which may date back as far as _____; found in 1939 in fragments inside a cave at Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, the "Lion Man" statuette is nearly a foot tall, is carved from the tusk of a woolly mammoth, and may represent a visionary figure seen by a shaman during a trance.

40,000 BCE

_______ is the branch of philosophy that addresses the nature of beauty, especially in art, and that deals with art more broadly speaking—its creative sources, its forms, and its effects.

Aesthetics

At the time of the Spanish conquest, the _____ Empire was the largest in the world, and the 15th-century terraced settlement of Machu Picchu, in the heart of the Andes Mountains, is one of the architectural and engineering wonders of the premodern world, with buildings laid out so that windows and doors framed spectacular views of sacred peaks and facilitated the tracking of important astronomical events.

Aztec

Nebuchadnezzar II's _______ was one of the ancient world's greatest cities, boasting the biblical Tower of Babel and the Ishtar Gate, with its dazzling blue-glazed bricks with reliefs of real and imaginary animals.

Babylon

Composition refers to how an artist organizes forms in an artwork, either by placing shapes on a flat surface or by arranging forms in space; the principles of composition include ______, symmetry, and emphasis; pattern, repetition and rhythm, variety and unity; movement; and proportion and scale.

Balance

Until the "great scramble" of late 19th century, when European countries colonized the majority of the African continent, one of the major powers in West Africa was the kingdom of Benin, in what is now southwest Nigeria; in 1897, the _______ sent an armed expedition which captured the king of Benin, destroyed his palace and took away large quantities of sculpture and regalia, including works in wood, ivory and especially brass, some of which came from royal altars for the king's ancestors, but also including a large number of cast brass plaques made to decorate the wooden pillars of the palace—these "Benin plaques" were highly sought after by museums across Europe and America.

British

One of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made was the army of thousands of life-size terracotta soldiers that guarded the immense burial mound of Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor of ______; although the burial mound remains unexcavated, archaeologists believe that it contains a vast treasure-filled underground funerary palace designed to match the fabulous palace the emperor occupied while alive, guarded by the army of sculptures found in surrounding pits, which probably numbered 8,000 or more.

CHina

One of the world's largest religious monuments is the Angkor Wat, built in the 12th century in what is today _______; originally dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, it gradually became a Buddhist temple as Buddhism was embraced by Khmer rulers.

Cambodia

The Maya believed that Heaven and Earth consisted of 13 layers, and below, the Underworld, or Xibalba (the Place of Fear), had nine levels ruled by gods of the dead who subjected humans to various tortures. Mayan architecture incorporates references to this cosmology and to astronomy, exemplified by the Castillo at ______ in the Yucatán Peninsula, which has nine stepped stories symbolizing the nine Underworld levels, while atop the pyramid, which is oriented to the four cardinal points, is a temple dedicated to Kukulcán, the Maya equivalent of the Teotihuacán feathered-serpent god and the Aztec Quetzalcoatl; at the winter and summer equinoxes, the sun casts a shadow that takes the shape of the serpent-god's body, giving the impression of Kukulcán slithering along the pyramid's face as the sun moves across the sky.

Chichén Itzá

The more recent system for designating historical time uses the initials B.C.E. ("Before ______") and C.E. instead of B.C. ("Before Christ") and A.D. (______) in order to emphasize the fact that scientific and academic scholarship is non-denominational in pursuing factual information and knowledge.

Common Era, Anno Domini

The capital of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain (r. 756-1031) was _______, where the caliphs (rulers) constructed and expanded the Great Mosque between the 8th and 10th centuries; the expansive mezquita (Spanish, "mosque") features overlapping horseshoe-shaped arches, elaborate multilobed arches, costly marbles, and mosaic-covered domes.

Cordoba

Completed in 1420, the _______ in Beijing was the political and ritual center of China for over 500 years; as a ceremonial, ritual and living space, the architects who designed its layout followed the ideal cosmic order in Confucian ideology that had held Chinese social structure together for centuries, ensuring that all activities were conducted in the manner appropriate to the participants' social and familial roles.

Forbidden City

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Great Pyramids of Gizeh, Egypt, Fourth Dynasty, ca. 2551-2472 BCE

The images of animals found at _______ are rendered in what has come to be called "twisted perspective," in which their bodies are depicted in profile while we see the horns from a more frontal viewpoint.

Hall of Bulls, Lascaux, France

Proportion concerns the size relationships of the parts of persons, buildings, or objects, and in certain times and places, like ancient Greece, artists devised canons of "correct" or "ideal" proportions for human figures and building components according to mathematical ratios like the "golden ratio;" in other cases, artists have used disproportion for expressive effect, or to focus attention on one body part (often the head) or one group member (usually the leader), utilizing ______ to emphasize the most important figure or element by intentionally creating "unnatural" discrepancies in proportion.

Hierarchy of scale

n Christian art, two intersecting lines of unequal length or a simple geometric cross can serve as an emblem of the religion as a whole, symbolizing the cross of Jesus Christ's crucifixion, and a scale may be used to symbolize justice or the weighing of souls on Judgment Day; both of these are examples of ______, a word derived from Greek root words that literally means the "writing of images," and that refers both to the content, or subject, of an artwork, and to the study of content in art, especially the study and interpretation of symbols, which are images that stand for other images or ideas.

Iconography

From the 12th to the 15th centuries, _____ flourished as a powerful, cosmopolitan and wealthy city-state, an influential center of trade connected to extensive local and long-distance trade networks which enabled the region to prosper; according to Yoruba myth, it is the place where the gods Oduduwa and Obatala created the earth and its peoples, and tradition identifies Oduduwa as the first oni ("ruler" or "king") and the ancestor of all Yoruba kings. Sculpture excavated here is exceptional for the idealized naturalism of facial features and anatomy, although the heads of rulers are disproportionately large, symbolizing the power of leadership, and the Yoruba belief in the head as the essence of being and the seat of an individual's destiny.

Ife

The Dome of the Rock (687-692) in _______ is not a mosque, but a tribute to the triumph of Islam; the monumental shrine rises from a huge platform known as the Noble Enclosure, where in ancient times the Hebrews built the Temple of Solomon (destroyed by Romans), and a rocky outcropping on the site is the reputed location of Adam's grave, the spot where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and the place where Muhammed began his miraculous journey to Heaven (the Miraj).

Jerusalem

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Edo period, ca. 1826-1833

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Edo period, ca. 1826-1833

Originally, the use of ______ cloth in Ghana was reserved for Asante (or Ashanti) royalty and limited to special social and sacred functions, and even as production increased and it became more accessible to those outside the royal court, it continued to be associated with wealth, high social status, and cultural sophistication.

Kente

Sacred medicines and divine protection are central to the belief of the _______ peoples; a nkisi nkondi is a wooden power figure, carved under the divine authority and in consultation with an nganga or spiritual specialist who activates the figure through chants, prayers and the preparation of sacred substances which are aimed at 'curing' physical, social or spiritual ailments.

Kongo

In the early 13th century, King _____ of the Zagwe dynasty, which had conquered Aksum, embraced Christianity, and transformed his capital city into a "New Jerusalem," a pilgrimage site for Ethiopian Christians, commissioning stonemasons and sculptors to cut 11 churches out of the bedrock, linked by tunnels and walkways below ground level. One of these, Beta Giorghis, the Church of Saint George, was cut in the form of a Greek cross (a cross with four arms of equal length), with a cross sculpted in relief on the roof to underscore the sacred shape of the church, and a hemispherical dome hollowed out beneath the cruciform roof.

Lalibela

The _____ occupied parts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras at sites including Copán, Tikal, and later Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán Peninsula, where they built vast complexes of temple-pyramids, palaces, plazas, and ball courts and decorated them with large-scale sculptures and mural paintings glorifying their rulers and gods; they also left extensive written records and possessed a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and arithmetic calculation.

Maya

The Islamic house of worship is known as a mosque (from Arabic masjid, "a place of prostration"), and while style and materials have varied over time and by region, certain basic features are essential: the qibla wall, which indicates the direction toward Mecca that Muslims face while praying, is usually marked by a _______, a semicircular niche set into the wall.

Mihrab

Creating the illusion of volume in a two-dimensional work of art is achieved through the use of______, or chiaroscuro, the use of light and shadow to depict volume.

Modeling

slam, Judaism, and Christianity are monotheistic Abrahamic faiths, sharing many of the same holy sites and prophets; Islam was founded in modern-day Saudi Arabia by _______ (c. 570-632 C.E.)—believed by Muslims to be the final in a line of prophets including Moses, Abraham, and Jesus—who began to receive revelations of God, or Allah in Arabic, through the archangel Gabriel, and his divine revelations form the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam.

Muhammad

By showing the king wearing, on one side, the high, white conical crown of Upper Egypt, and on the other, wearing Lower Egypt's red crown topped by its distinctive wiry projection, the palette of King _____ probably commemorates events from the wars leading to the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. It is one of the earliest labeled historical artworks, with multiple hieroglyphs, and one of the earliest examples of the conventional representation of figures that characterized most Egyptian art for 3,000 years; at the center of the palette, the intertwined animal necks may symbolize the unification of the two kingdoms.

Narmer

When the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico, their own chief god, Huitzilopochtli (Hummingbird of the South), a war and sun/fire deity, joined Mesoamerican gods including Tlaloc, the rain and fertility god, and the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, who was a benevolent god of life, wind, and learning and culture, as well as the patron of priests. Huitzilopochtli was the son of Coatlicue (She of the Serpent Skirt), who was also the mother of _____ (She of the Golden Bells) and 400 sons, the Centzon Huitznahua (Four Hundred Southerners), who, jealous that their mother was pregnant with Huitzilopochtli, banded together to murder her. At the moment of Coatlicue's death, she gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, who slaughtered Coyolxauhqui and most of his brothers, then cut his sister's body into pieces and threw them down Coatepec Mountain.

Pachacuti

The Raimondi Stele, from the main temple at Chavín de Huántar in _____, ca. 800-200 BCE, features an incised image of the "staff god" wearing a headdress of faces and snakes; the god's face, when viewed upside down, becomes two faces, thus illustrating the ability of gods to transform themselves, which is a core aspect of Andean religion.

Peru

Tattooing was common practice throughout much of Oceania, especially in ______, and the function of tattoos went beyond personal beautification, indicating status, identifying clan or familial connections, providing spiritual protection, and marking significant events, as in Hawaii, where a tattooed tongue was a sign of grief, and the pain the person endured in the application of the tattoo was a sign of respect for the deceased.

Polynesia

The islands of the eastern Pacific are known as _______, from the Greek for "many islands." Set within a triangle formed by Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the south, Hawaii to the north and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the east, the islands were settled by people with a common cultural heritage.

Polynesia

Believed to function as king's tomb, temple, and palace in the afterlife, the Gizeh pyramids were not isolated structures but are each part of a vast funerary complex; they are the culmination of a massive feat of labor organization, engineering and mathematical expertise, and mastery of _____ construction, a technique using carefully cut and regularly shaped blocks of stone piled in successive horizontal rows, called courses, using ramps, ropes, and levers to lift and lower stones.

Post and lintel

The evolution of tomb shape from mastaba to stepped pyramid to pyramid probably reflects the influence of Heliopolis, the seat of the powerful cult of _____, whose emblem was a pyramidal stone, the ben-ben. The pyramids are symbols of the sun, and the sun's rays are perceived as the ladder that the god-king uses to ascend to the heavens. The pyramids were where Egyptian kings were reborn in the afterlife, just as the sun is reborn each day at dawn. The three major pyramids at Gizeh are oriented to the cardinal points of the compass, and were covered in white limestone to reflect sunlight, underscoring the pyramid's solar symbolism.

RE

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Stele with the Laws of Hammurabi, Babylon, Iraq, ca. 1780 BCE

_______, perhaps originally a funerary site where Neolithic peoples cremated their dead, seems in its latest phase to have functioned as a kind of astronomical observatory and accurate solar calendar, with the sun rising over its "heel stone" at the summer solstice.

Stonehenge

In the years following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World in 1492, Spain poured money into expeditions probing the coasts of North and South America, but the Spaniards had little luck finding the wealth they sought. A subsequent expedition, headed by Hernán Cortés, was the first to make contact with the great Aztec emperor Moctezuma II at _____. In only two years, with the help of guns, horses, native allies revolting against their Aztec overlords, and perhaps also a smallpox epidemic that had swept across the Caribbean and already thinned the Aztec ranks, Cortés managed to overthrow the vast and rich Aztec Empire in 1521, opening the door to hordes of Spanish conquistadors seeking their fortunes and to missionaries eager for new converts to Christianity.

Tenochtitlán

The principal building of the religious center of the Aztec capital ______ was the Hueteocalli—now called the Templo Mayor ("Great Temple")—a temple-pyramid honoring the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli and the local rain god Tlaloc, with two great staircases originally sweeping upward from the plaza level to the two sanctuaries at the summit.

Tenochtitlán

The two most important Mexica deities were Huitzilopochtli, a god of war associate with the sun, and _______, a rain and agricultural god, symbolized by the twin temples atop the Templo Mayor, the largest and most important temple in the empire, in the center of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City); together, the deities communicated the Mexica focus on warfare, because fire and water, known in Nahuatl as atl-tlachinolli, symbolized war, which was essential to the expansion of the Mexica empire.

Tlaloc

Although the spectrum colors merge into each other, artists usually conceive of their hues as distinct from one another. Color has two basic variables—the apparent amount of light reflected and the apparent purity, and a change in one must produce a change in the other; the term _____ refers to the relative lightness or darkness of a color, while the terms "intensity" or "saturation" refer to the purity of a color, that is, its brightness or dullness.

Value

One of the oldest (c. 28,000-25,000 BCE) and most famous Paleolithic images is the tiny limestone figurine known as _______, whose anatomical exaggerations emphasize her female reproductive capacity, suggesting that the statuette likely served as a fertility image.

Venus of Willendorf

The ______ Temple at Khajuraho features three towers over the mandapas (halls), each rising higher than the preceding one, leading to the tallest tower at the rear, in much the same way that the foothills of the Himalayas, Shiva's home, rise to meet their highest peak, and under the tallest tower or shikhara is the garbha griha (womb chamber), the small and dark inner sanctuary chamber, like a cave, which houses the image of the deity; its exterior walls feature extensive relief sculpture, including mithunas—pairs of men and women embracing or engaged in sexual intercourse—which may suggest fertility and the propagation of life, and they may also illustrate the principle that the ultimate goal of the worshiper is to achieve the union of the individual human soul with the infinite divine.

Vishvanatha

Although men own and perform most masks in Africa, in Mende society, women control and dance Sande society masks, while Mende men perform the Poro society masks; the Sande society controls the initiation, education, and acculturation of girls, and women maskers function as initiators, teachers, and mentors, helping girl novices with their transformation into educated and marriageable women. Sande women associate their Sowie masks with ______ and the color black, which the society, in turn, connects with human skin color and the civilized world, and the mask features refer to ideals of female beauty, morality, and behavior, with the large forehead signifying wisdom, the neck design beauty and health, and the plaited hair the order of ideal households.

Water Spirits

The Nasca produced immense earth drawings across the desert by selectively removing the dark top layer of stones to expose the light clay and calcite below using simple stone-and-string methods and basic geometry. The vast arrangement of the "Nasca Lines" is a system, a traversable map oriented to underground _____ that may also have functioned as pilgrimage routes.

Water sources

A Maori ______, like Te Hau-ki-Turanga in Poverty Bay, New Zealand, was a place for the male members of the community to assemble in the benevolent presence of their ancestors; the very structure of the building symbolized the body of an ancestor or of the ultimate ancestor, the sky father, with the exterior barge boards (the angled boards outlining the house gables) representing his outstretched arms, the ridge beam his spine, and the rafters his ribs.

Wharenui

Influenced by ______, the vessels used in the Japanese tea ceremony reflect the concepts of wabi, the aesthetic of refined rusticity or a simple plain quality, and sabi, the value found in weathered objects, suggesting the tranquility of old age.

Zen Buddhism

The Great Stupa at Sanchi is a 50-foot-tall domical mound topped by a pole marking the axis of the universe that contains relics of the Buddha; in accordance with Buddhist ritual, worshipers venerate (honor) the Buddha's remains through ______, walking around the sacred mound in a clockwise direction, echoing the movement of the earth and the sun, and this circular movement brings the devotee into harmony with the cosmos.

circumambulation

The oldest written documents known are Sumerian records of commercial transactions and administrative acts, transcribed first using pictographs which were eventually simplified into wedge-shaped _______ signs.

cuneiform

Perspective is one of the most important pictorial devices for organizing forms in space, used to create an illusion of depth or space on a two-dimensional surface, and perspective devices include the reduction of figure size, the convergence of diagonal lines, and the blurring of distant forms, along with ______, which produces the illusion that one part of the body is farther away than another.

foreshortening

Art appreciation involves the development of observational skills in order to analyze the visual elements and principles of composition used by the artist, while art history requires knowledge of _____, provenance, and patronage, in addition to formal analysis and aesthetic judgment; art historians seek to understand not only why artworks appear as they do but also why those works exist at all.

historical context

The _______ of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) are colossal monolithic sculptures that stand in rows on stone platforms (ahu) marking burial or sacred sites used for religious ceremonies and probably represent ancestral chiefs.

moai

Mughal ruler Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal, which means Crown Palace, as a memorial to his favorite wife, whose official title was Mumtaz Mahal, or Chosen of the Palace; the glistening white marble ______ seems to float magically above the broad water channels and tree-lined reflecting pools punctuating the fountain-filled garden leading to it, and the tomb may have been conceived as the throne of God perched above the gardens of Paradise.

mosque

Defining artistic style is one of the key elements of art historical inquiry, and analysis often involves several different kinds of style, including period style (for example, Romanesque or Gothic), personal style (for example, abstract, realistic, or expressionistic), or regional style, which considers an artwork's______, or place of origin.

provenance

The most important development in human history is known as _______, and it refers to the development of the technology needed to plant and harvest crops and to domesticate animals.

the Neolithic Revolution

Scenes of daily life and landscapes rose to prominence in 18th-century Japan with the proliferation of inexpensive multicolor woodblock prints, and the emergence of a new urban aesthetic known as ______, or pictures of the floating world, an ancient Buddhist term describing the transience of human life and the ephemerality of the material world; one of the most renowned Japanese printmakers specializing in landscapes was Katsushika Hokusai, whose The Great Wave off Kanagawa shows the influence of imported Dutch landscape engravings, and incorporates the distinctive European color called Prussian blue, but also engages the Japanese pictorial tradition: against a background with the low horizon typical of Western painting, the artist placed in the foreground the wave's more traditionally flat and powerfully graphic forms, mainly curved triangles.

ukiyo-e